Intelligent design (ID) is perhaps the most widely-discussed non-idea of all time. There seem to be three reasons why real scholars discuss it:
1. It is historically an idea that had influence on intellectual history, up to, say, 1860
2. It is an idea that needs to be discussed because the religious put it forward in opposition to science
and
3. It allows one to discuss interesting ideas by acting as a kind of Gedankensexperiment.
It is the latter that Sahotra Sarkar’s forthcoming paper in Synthese addresses.
As Sarkar notes, may people have asked whether ID qualifies as science. The standard answer is that the designer is opaque to scientific investigation, in which case the hypothesis is not science (because it is uninvestigable), or it is not, in which case it is failed science. But Sarkar uses it to riff off the issue of the demarcation criterion which I have discussed here before. He takes the lack of precision in ID to not be, ipso facto, reason to deny ID is science, because, as is well known these days, many theories (he uses Elton and Macarthur’s hypothesis of the relationship between diversity and stability of ecosystems as an example) fail to have precise terms. I even think that a certain degree of imprecision is usually necessary for a hypothesis in its early days.
The problem is that demarcation criteria assume a context independence which is historically and sociologically false. What counts as a theory in science is relativised to the state of the science at a time and place. The use of demarcation criteria in this context is usually political, says Sarkar. But for a theory to be subjected even to contextual criteria, there needs to be a theory there in the first place, and this requires that there be some terms that have shared meanings, and shared methods, that are employed in the theory under test. Terms like mass need to be relevant, which is to say, they need to be interpretable in empirical ways. ID fails in this sense en masse.
He writes, “In the voluminous corpus of its [ID's] proponents, there seems to be no attempt to de?ne “intelligence” in any way whatsoever. Except in analogy to intelligent human agents, we are not told what it means.” They do not give accounts in tractable cases like animal intelligence. They do not explicate what it means to be “specified” or “complex”. Sarkar makes a number of criticisms of the analogies used by ID: why is the fragility of “irreducible complexity” a sign of competence, rather than incompetence? We use redundancy to guard against failure, why wouldn’t the Designer? [A side issue, Wesley Elsberry and I introduced the notion of a rarefied design in contrast to the ordinary design to which it is analogous, and pointed out that the analogy fails - where design is like human ordinary design, the inferences used by ID fails, and where it is not, it tells you nothing.]
He dissects Dembski’s actual precisification of ID: it is impossible to evaluate the probability of a pattern without knowing ahead of time how likely it is, and Dembski introduces a bit of special pleading in his criterion of complex specified information. Sarkar writes:
Where are we left? We have no positive speci?cation of “intelligence” whatsoever. We only have, at best, an incoherent attempt at a positive speci?cation of “design.” In other words, we have no theory of ID at all. It follows, that we are in no position to judge whether the theory meets some demarcation criterion should we want to play that game.
That is, we can’t even apply a demarcation criterion if we have one. There’s no “there” there.
Late note: Brian Switek at Laelaps also has a discussion.
Sarkar, S. (2009). The science question in intelligent design Synthese DOI: 10.1007/s11229-009-9540-x
I wonder whether it would help to separate Science from The Scientific Method. I love Feyerabend’s argument that organised crime fell the right side of the demarcation tracks, but if you’re demarcating The Scientific Method this is fine. But the reason organised crime isn’t science is because it’s not studying the right thing.
Perhaps Science consists of what questions scientists ask when they are Doing Science, and also The Scientific Method that they use to answer it.
I will be most disappointed if the next time I look in here there isn’t a list of N philosophers who have made the point, in greater detail, more subtly and with much longer words. And probably explaining why this approach is naïve and wrong.
Snowflake:
But to remain science they must evolve in some logical way, and not just change arbitrarily. Suppose that the vast majority of scientists turned fundamentalist and adopted the standard that a literal reading of the Bible trumps all other evidence. Would that make that a valid scientific standard, and make YEC a valid scientific inference? Surely not. (If this example sounds too sudden to be considered “evolving”, imagine that the change happened gradually. Scientists might start by giving only a negligible weight to Biblical evidence, and gradually increase that weight over time.)
If scientific standards are not to be just arbitrary (as postmodernists might claim) there must be some meta-standard for judging them, even if that standard is applied intuitively and not explicitly. It seems to me there are two possibilities:
– Scientific standards are judged by their results, e.g. they lead to theories that allow us to predict observations better than do alternative standards.
– Scientific standards are logically derivable from more basic standards, which in turn were judged by their results. (I would say that the most basic principles of induction are probably innate in us. It was natural selection that judged them to be effective.)
I am not sure if Snowy’s comment about pessimistic meta-induction was aimed at me or at the people with whom I am debating but I will give my take on scientific realism anyway.
I am a realist, I am a scientific realist, I am to some extent a naïve realist; I believe that there is a real world out there that we can perceive and observe with our senses and that science is the only available system to analyse and explain this real world. I think science delivers explanations for phenomena that we observe in this real world. I also think that with time these explanation have gotten better and better and this is what scientific realists mean when they say that our scientific explanation get closer and closer to the truth, whatever that may be. I personally don’t think that one needs to invoke the concept of truth; one only needs to consider the concept of utility or usefulness. Our scientific explanations of the real natural world have gotten better with time simply because we can do more with them. When we apply our explanatory theories in order to control, change or influence the world in which we live we can observe whether our explanations are useful or not. Our scientific theories when utilised in applied science and science based or aided technology are effective and work; we can land men on the moon and bring them back again; we can effectively eradicate diseases; we can construct various types of motorised vehicles; we can…
Our theories work when applied to the real world and over the millennia our ability to utilise the products of science have expanded immensely. I am not sure if one can quantise this progress in any sort of effective manner but anybody who would deny it is either blind, dumb or a liar.
John is fond of quoting Ian Hacking on the ontology of physical particle who says (paraphrasing) ‘if I can utilise it, it exists’; I can spray electrons therefore they exist. I argue that we can utilise the results of science therefore science has an objective reality but I am still convinced that a ‘science truth machine’ that is a normative epistemology will never exist.
It would seem to me that what is at issue are sciences relationships with a wider world on the issue of i.d. and its relationship with wider cultural history.
Once you have a full understanding of the basics
it would seem to my very philosophical
untutored eye that this is the time to start gazing in philosophical reflection.
I’ve certainly put a lot of the philosophical questions I need to engage with on hold as they can wait until I’ve stood the material on its feet and let it run around rather than sitting on the floor and analyzing the script.
But then my only experience of philosophy comes from the dancing master of the Old Vic Theatre School where I first trained before University.